The toys were still in my hands when I saw her. Barefoot on the cold marble, in her wrinkled yellow dress, picking dry dog food out of the bowl with fingers that wouldn't stop shaking.

Once Sophie was deeply asleep, tucked safely in the center of his massive king-sized bed, Richard stepped quietly out onto the adjoining private balcony. The freezing autumn air bit into his skin, but he barely felt it. He pulled his encrypted cell phone from his pocket and dialed a number he hadn't called in three years.

"Yeah." The voice on the other end was gravelly, heavy with sleep and suspicion.

"Marcus," Richard said, staring out over the dark expanse of Lake Michigan. "I need you at the estate. Bring the equipment."

There was a pause. Marcus had been Richard's head enforcer long before the suits and the legitimate corporate titles. He knew exactly what that tone meant.

"Give me twenty minutes, boss," Marcus replied, and the line went dead.

When Marcus arrived, he bypassed the front gates, using the old service road that didn't trigger the main house sensors. Richard let him in through the side terrace doors, leading the massive, scarred man directly down into the soundproof basement where the estate's central security servers were housed.

"Pull the footage from the last two weeks," Richard commanded, standing behind Marcus as the enforcer rapidly typed on the glowing keyboard. "Kitchen, hallways, playrooms. Everything."

Marcus pulled up the grid. He clicked through the dates, his brow furrowing deeper with every file he opened.

"It's gone, Richard," Marcus growled, pointing at the black screens on the monitor. "The external cameras on the gates are fine, but the internal house feeds have been systematically wiped. Someone programmed a looping glitch into the software to overwrite the hard drives every twelve hours."

Richard's eyes narrowed into dangerous slits. "Eleanor doesn't know how to code a security loop. She had help from the inside."

"Whoever did it had admin access," Marcus noted, bringing up the user logs. "They scrubbed their digital fingerprints, but they couldn't hide the fact that the system was manually bypassed."

"I want a full background sweep on Eleanor," Richard ordered, his voice echoing coldly off the concrete walls. "I want her banking records, her phone logs, her deleted emails. I want to know who she spoke to, who she slept with, and where she buys her coffee. I want her life stripped down to the bone by tomorrow night."